Use employees to interact on Twitter: Vancity social media strategy

If social media is about embracing community then Vancity, a Vancouver credit union, has developed a social media strategy that optimizes its strongest asset: it's employees.

Our approach to social media is that our employees, who interact with our members daily in the real world, should represent us online as well.

Employees of Vancity, who are on Twitter, can engage in communications on behalf of the credit union. While the Vancity Twitter page is still quite new and doesn't quite feature a significant amount of activity yet, the extended reach of the company through its employees promises to create a strong and integrated network.

Canadian Banks: How do they measure up on Twitter? [UPDATED]

Canadian banks have always operated as a model for traditional and established business practice. As the financial scene is becoming more competitive however, even financial organizations are looking to social media to attract new customers. By using services such as Twitter, banks can build their image and improve public relations.

In terms of their twitter presence, just how do Canada's leading names in finance measure up?

CIBC (@CIBCnews): C

Activity: CIBC posts about 0-4 posts daily -- and usually not more than 7 tweets each week. The account only tweets stories about CIBC and does not show any interactions with customers.

Community: With 1789 followers and being listed 96 times, CIBC isn't the worst on this list, but still has a long way to go.

Content: The CIBC page features the institution's colour, logo, and a link to their main website, but there is no mention of a social media team.

Bank of Montreal (@BMO): B+

Activity: BMO is an institution whose only recently become more involved with Twitter. Previously, the account posted tweets only once every few days and rarely responded to their customers. Now, the BMO social media team (2 members: ^SR and ^PG) regularly post about 7-12 posts daily that respond to customer comments and concerns and provide links to interesting and topical materials.

Community: BMO only has about 1157 followers and is only listed 40 times, which shows that they're not be as integrated into the social media community as some of the other banks, but with the recent increase in activity, these numbers should increase.

Content: Their twitter page also has a sidebar that provides phone numbers, links to other social media sites and their website -- and it actually displays well in my browser (unlike some of the others below). It is also customized to feature BMO-themed colours.

Social Media Day is happening on June 30 in cities across Canada

Mashable's second annual Social Media Day is a celebration of the technological advancements that enable everyone to connect with real-time information, communicate from miles apart and have their voices be heard.

It's also a chance to chat with your online friends in an offline context.

Mashable and Meetup are being used to organize SMD celebrations across the world. In Canada, there are meetups in Vancouver and Toronto, while other cities like Waterloo, Ottawa, and Calgary may or may not end up happening (they need more attendees and planners!).

If you can't make one of the SMD celebrations, you can still follow along on Twitter by using the hashtag #SMday.

How women are taking over the social web

This article was written by Douglas Idugboe and originally published on Smedio.

In the words of Martina McBride, “This One’s For The Girls.” Don’t look now, but women have taken over social media channels. Females spend more time than males on social media sites. They also contribute more, use mobile social networking more and they buy more stuff online than men do. A new survey released this week by the Pew Internet and American Life Project corroborates numerous other studies that show women dominating social media websites. This is particularly the case with Facebook and Twitter usage. The Pew survey found that more women than men use Facebook and Twitter regularly. They perform Facebook status and profile updates more regularly, comment more, add more photos and click the Like button more than men. If it were not for the constant feminine energy fueling Facebook on a daily basis, the site would be dead.

Participation in Social Network Sites Nearly Doubled and Majority are Women

The comprehensive telephone Pew survey of about 2,000 Americans found that the use of social media by Americans nearly doubled from 2008 to 2010. In 2008, only twenty-six percent of all adults and thirty-four percent of Internet users used social media. Just two-years later, forty-seven percent of all adults use social media and fifty-nine percent of Internet users now regularly frequent at least one site. Not only are more people than ever before using Facebook and other networking sites, they are also older. The average age used to be thirty-three, now it’s thirty-eight. And the social Web is now ruled by estrogen. Women make up over half of all social media users at fifty-six percent, and they hold sway over emailing, instant messaging, blogging and photo sharing, as well.

Social Media: The World's Citizen Wall

It was incredibly heartwarming to witness the amazing recovery of downtown Vancouver after the chaos of the post-Canucks game riot.

Whether orchestrated by professional out-of-town thugs as the VPD suggest or simply the culminating chaos of myriad drunken fools, the riot damaged buildings, cars, people, and the reputation of our fine city.

But what better way to restore both the city and its reputation than with numerous volunteers from all walks of life banding together to say, "THIS is MY Vancouver"—and no rioters can take that away.

The epicentre of this recovery effort is the Citizen Wall, which will surely make history in Vancouver.

How to Get Social Media to Work for Your Business

While investigating the "real costs" of social media for companies, I came to understand that social media success boils down to three elements that would apply just as well to a traditional marketing effort. Know your target audience. Set realistic expectations for inputs and outputs. And track everything, so you can chuck what isn’t working and pour your resources into what is working. I think these tips are good for newbies and social media wonks alike.

Know Your Audience

When Ice.com, a Montreal-based online seller of jewelry, launched a Facebook campaign last year called “Love Story” to sell more jewelry around Valentine’s Day, they knew their target audience: women between ages of 35 and 60 living in USA and Canada. And they knew where to find their target market to acquire more leads online: Facebook.

Participants in the campaign were asked to tell their love story on a custom-built Facebook page in return for the chance to win a piece of jewelry.

As rioters disgrace Vancouver worldwide, social media will play major role in delivering justice [UPDATED]

It's easy for pundits to scoff at the credibility of "citizen journalism" in social media.

But for anyone following the incredible riot in downtown Vancouver last night after the Boston Bruins trounced the Canucks, it was difficult to deny the value of platforms like Twitter, where people there, in the midst of the mayhem, were publishing hundreds of up-close photos and videos in real-time for the world to see.

Of course, it's not exactly something you want the world to see: wildly drunk teenage males kicking in the windows and burning the awning of the historic Hudsons Bay building; black-masked vandalistic rabble rousers touting fire extinguishers spraying innocent bystanders; swarms of maddened men looting armfuls of goods from London Drugs and Louis Vuitton; the beautiful glass architecture of Chapters being punctured by various metal and concrete projectiles; flipped cars and flipped porta-potties; burning cars and dumpsters; and an outbreak of vicious fights and stabbings.

Shameful. Disgraceful. A giant black mark on what was, only one year ago, the Olympic City. The reputation of millions irreversibly damaged by a select few.

But social media, at the very least, will assist in the delivery of justice.

7 Ways to Give Your Social Media Presence a Boost

This article was written by Douglas Idugboe and originally published on Smedio.

A lot has been said and talked about social media in the business world. Several recent surveys and research reports have indicated that social media is firmly on its way to becoming a norm rather than an exception amongst businesses. Whether its large multi-national enterprises or SMBs, everybody seems to be in a mood to cash in on the social media opportunity.

However, merely having Facebook and Twitter profiles will do no good to your business. You need to proactively look for ways to boost your social media presence. In this post, I present 7 proven tips which will help you boost your social media presence.

Exclusivity

You certainly don’t want to end up being another Tom, Dick or Harry in the social media crowd. Focus on exclusivity and it will bring you rich rewards. I’ve come across several businesses which carved out a niche by providing exclusive and quality content. If you differentiate yourself, it provides a massive boost to your social media presence.

More Canadian companies are permitting social networking on the job - as if they could stop us

Well, this was inevitable: more Canadian businesses than ever are allowing social networking to occur on company time.

The finding is a result of a Robert Half Technology survey, which suggests that nearly half of Canadian chief information officers permit access to social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook on the job if it's for business purposes—a number that has doubled from 22 percent just two years ago in 2009.

However, one in three organizations still live in the stone age and attempt, likely with great futility, to completely prohibit it at the office. (Fortunately, this number has fallen from 58 percent in 2009.)

But you know what happens when a higher power tries to intervene on what the mass public views as an essential component of society (*cough Prohibition *cough).

Something tells me Mark Zuckerberg allows employees to use Facebook in his offices.

While social media is different from alcohol in more than a few ways, the concept is the same: we want to drink, we want to tweet. We have mobile touchscreen computers in our pockets and accounts on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, and nobody is going to stop us.

At this point, spending five minutes managing your social networks is no different than having a chat with a colleague at the water cooler—it's not an addiction, it's engaging and interacting with your social community.

And the sooner these one-in-three Canadian businesses realize and accept that, the better.

As Gary Vaynerchuck so succinctly pointed out at today's The Art of Marketing Conference in Vancouver, "This is 2011."

So act like it.

What the $10-million acquisition of AdGrok means for Twitter's business model and future

This article was written by Douglas Idugboe and originally published on Smedio.

Twitter, the wildly popular micro-blogging service, announced this week it’s acquiring the start-up keyword bidding company AdGrok for under $10 million. That’s not bad for a young company that just transitioned out of beta not too long ago. The AdGrok founders will immediately shut up shop and join Twitter in developing its fledgling “revenue engineering team.” That is, except AdGrok’s CEO Antonio Garcia-Martinez, who jumped ship to rival Facebook before the deal was inked.

AdGrok’s AdWords Tool Just What Twitter Needs

The AdGrok team will be handed the monumental task of expanding the new advertising platform of Twitter, a company that has failed to turn a profit since its inception in 2006. However, Twitter has a bright future ahead, and the AdGrok team with its brilliant tool that automates Google AdWords campaigns, could potentially transform Twitter’s revenue model into a profitable one.

Twitter is on an Acquisition Frenzy

Twitter is positioning itself to go full throttle with the development of its monetization platform of Promoted Products offerings. The promoted services would be geared towards corporate power users, including tweets, trends and accounts for small to medium size businesses. AdGrok’s Google AdWords dashboard is nearly identical to what Twitter has in mind for its promoted services. The acquisition is a good fit all around, and Twitter may be just getting started with its mergers and acquisitions deals.

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